My writing partner and I recently discussed character motivation. This led to a tangential discussion about, well, tangents. One of those tangents relates to a concept I have mentioned in a few blogs but have never explored, which is commitment.  The reason I think talking about commitment is important is because I believe that the lack or fear of commitment results in a form of writer’s block. To piggyback on my last blog, there are many forms of this insidious condition, and one of them is what I will call “The Paralysis of Possibilities.” Contrary to the classic image of a person suffering writer’s block staring into the white abyss of a blank page with nothing to say, the Paralysis of Possibilities is where the writer either refuses or cannot bring themselves to commit to a definite path and instead keeps trying to one-up their ideas. To understand this, you need to look at how stories unfold in your mind. Every action by your character, every decision you make about their occupation, motives, even appearance opens up a plethora of additional options that are possible, sort of like Build-a-Bear for stories. Maybe it is helpful to think of the decisions like a flowchart. Every time you decide something about them, you are going to create two forks, a sort of yes/no flow. Potentially, each fork will create two more and so on. For example, what if your character is a lawyer. Did he pass the bar the first time or did it take him six tries? Was he Law Review or was he 200th in a class of 201? Is he a District Attorney or a defense lawyer? All these things either matter or they don’t in the story. By the way, if they don’t then please stop thinking about them as soon as you realize this. You don’t need to know the waiter’s favorite color if all he does is deliver the poisoned sea bass to the hero. You don’t need to know that the villain collects rare coins and smashed his sled into a tree when he was six if none of that is relevant to the fact that he wants to let loose a pack of rabid wolverines on the floor of the United Nations.

Even when you eliminate unnecessary details, the decisions you make lead to having to make other decisions and on and on ad infinitum.  This leads to thoughts such as, “what if there’s an accountant who has a shrew wife that he can’t divorce because she would get the house and the car and the kids and take him to the cleaners financially, so he plots to kill her.  Maybe his hobby is sky diving and he decides to try to talk her into doing it with him so he can sabotage the chute and solve his problem. Nah, too far-fetched. Maybe his brother is a chemist that knows the exact drug to give her that is untraceable and will look like an accident. Nah, too close to home, any good detective would track that lead down.  Maybe the story would be better in reverse. It is the husband that is a shrewish prick and the wife has to eliminate him. Or maybe she thinks she is happy but she really isn’t and she finds this out because she does metal etchings in her spare time and when she orders the acid, the supply house bungles the order and instead of delivering her usual two-liter bottle of hydrochloric acid it delivers two fifty-gallon drums of the stuff instead. When she calls the supply house they insist that they sent her the right thing so there is no record of the drums sent to her and she suddenly realizes she could dissolve an entire person—her prick husband for instance—in the drum and no one would be the wiser. But that is really far-fetched, isn’t it? What if instead…

I think I’ve made my point. Not one of the ideas I mentioned above is a bad idea, if bad ideas actually exist. They all have advantages and interests and they all have pitfalls, but not one of them is unworkable in some way. To be honest, the etching wife has me intrigued even though I don’t usually write crime drama or murder mysteries. The important part to getting out of this non-productive “what if” loop is to decide and run with it.  Don’t let monkey mind play with it. Don’t let yourself extrapolate to a week from now when you have written twenty pages of useless crap that led nowhere, and you now have to start from scratch. Let me tell you now that you are bullshitting yourself. There is absolutely no way that you wrote twenty pages where nothing is salvageable. That is the deranged nightmare of your eternal pessimist making excuses for why you shouldn’t do anything. Because, let’s get real, if you don’t do anything, you can always say that you could have done it, but if you do it and it isn’t good, everyone, and most importantly, you will know you are a fraud and a charlatan.  Stop this now. I have that voice, too, believe me. Having recently been ejected unceremoniously from a nine-year relationship has that voice yelling in three-part harmony how unworthy, unskilled, unprepared and unlikable I truly am in life, let alone being a wannabe writer. Nothing comes from listening to that voice.  Literally. Nothing. Comes. From. It. I have a duffel bag full of false starts to prove that fact. All of those ideas could have and may become a successful story or they may remain a fire hazard of random papers in my ex-girlfriend’s closet—long story, let it go—but neither one of those possible outcomes is more important than the fact that those thousand pages of ideas, scenes,  and scraps of poems jumbled in that bag each brought me one step closer to the writer typing this blog today. I hope I am a better writer today than I was yesterday, and a poorer writer than I will be tomorrow, but I know without uncertainty that I am a better writer than the one who wrote most of the contents of that bag.  I also know that if I had committed to finishing those ideas I gave up on, I would be even better, because even if half of them became horrible stories I would never want to see the light of day, I would have written that much more and every word you write makes you write better. Stephen King says you have to write a million words before you can call yourself a writer. I disagree with the specificity of that statement but embrace the spirit of it. The more you write the more you learn. The more you learn the better you become. The better you become the more you enjoy it. The more you enjoy it the more you write. Rinse and repeat.

I will close with two things that can help you with commitment and making decisions. One has to do with timed exercises and the other has to do with establishing a concrete goal.

I recently did some work with a friend who makes films. He was telling me of a contest where the challenge was to make a film, start to finish in 48 hours. I imagine that the very thought of doing this has some of you wanting to go into a corner a shake for a while, but I want to do this yesterday. I think it would be so freeing because it all but eliminates the Paralysis of Possibilities. Practically, the only realistic way to get the film done is to write the script on Friday Night, shoot the film all day Saturday, and do post-production on Sunday.  Therefore, you cannot second guess anything you do. The idea is three people are stuck in an elevator and a banana must appear in the film? Okay. Go!

We can relate this to a writing exercise in several ways.

I want to relate a personal anecdote that I believe is relevant.  I am an artist. I draw in pastels.

I once had a show in a town hall and part of the getting the show was the ability to audit a master drawing class with a noted art teacher.  When I was in the class, the instructor told me I was good and had a great “sense of light” but asked me why I didn’t commit on the paper.  “You’re tentative when you draw your lines. And because you use pastels, you get to rub it out and do it again, but it doesn’t really get any better. You need to draw the line as if you can’t take it back. Make it count. What takes you four hours to draw should take you two.” I took this to heart and asked her if she had any advice on how to fix that and she said to do 10-minute sketches. “You have ten minutes and that’s it. That’s the piece. Frame it or throw it away. It’s done.”

I’ll admit I couldn’t commit to 10-minutes, so I did 30-minute sessions instead and the results were startling. They weren’t good. The first ones weren’t even decent. The exercises made me feel like I was back to drawing stick figures with crayons. However, I could see an actual style emerge as I made decisions and compromises to complete the piece in the allotted time. It distilled the intent I had. It made me a lot more precise and when I went back to drawing without the clock ticking, I found I was better and a lot, I mean a lot, faster.

We can apply this to writing. Let’s say you are a person who likes to outline. Decide you are going to write a short piece, screenplay, short story, memoir, whatever. Get a timer. Set the timer for an hour and write an outline in that time. When the timer goes off, that’s it. Whatever you have you need to go with. If you didn’t complete the outline you will have to wing the back half of the piece. Now reset that timer for, let’s say three hours. That is five pages an hour for a 15-page short story or a 15-minute short. At the end of the three hours you need to have a complete first draft.  Let’s consider one of the scenarios I listed above. Man wants to kill wife? Too common. Wife kills husband. A little rarer. Etching?  Yeah, cool, good idea. Okay, so she has to kill him first before she dissolves him. How?  He likes to come home from work, have a margarita and then a swim in the pool before dinner.  She takes Xanax for anxiety. It doesn’t matter about a tox screen because he is going to be husband soup in a few short hours. Slip six Xanax in the margarita. It will be bitter, though. Oh, just too much lime juice, honey. So sorry.  He gets groggy by the pool, or better yet, stall him in between the drink and the pool. Maybe throw him one last bang. Then he is groggy in the pool, and easy to drown.

Do you see where I am going? We can’t waste time on, maybe she just brains him with Aunt Gertrude’s cast iron Dutch oven when he walks in the door, or maybe she smothers him with a pillow because the specifics of his death don’t matter if the focus of the story is on the drums and what goes wrong with the plan—because something has to go wrong, right? You know that. And you have to decide what that is right now because tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

As I said, this exercise is either going to be good for you or it is going to send you running for a closet to shake and mumble to yourself.  It may in fact do both, but if you suffer from the “what if” procrastination, maybe you should give it a try.

The last exercise I want to tell you about is specifically about evoking emotions. I am going to try to do an entire blog on that subject next week, but I wanted to include this exercise because it can also help with structure and committing to certain paths.

What you do in this exercise is choose an everyday, innocuous sentence for a character to say at the end of your story. This would probably work for any length piece, but is probably most suited to short story, video short lengths. In honor of Bogart and Bacall I will call this “The Casablanca exercise.” The idea of the exercise is to evoke the same intensity of emotion when the character says the chosen line as the viewer feels when Bogie says, “Play it, Sam,” at the end of the movie.

For those of you still unclear, here are the details.  Take a line, any line that by itself would not necessarily evoke any intense reaction. Something like, “hand me my hat,” or “Do you have an umbrella?”  Though you could probably make a more advanced exercise where you use more inflammatory lines like, “I never liked you,” or “the baby is dead,” you should probably start with something a little easier. A side note, though. If you were to use something provocative, it would be more interesting to try to evoke the opposite emotion from the obvious. For instance, for the line, “I never liked you,” make the character who it is said to fall in love with the speaker when they hear it. Or make an entire room cheer when someone says, “the baby is dead.”

The idea is for the character to say the line out loud at the end and evoke in the reader/viewer some intense reaction.  They cry, they laugh uproariously, they feel like the character has triumphed over tremendous odds, or they feel the character has thrown in the towel.  Pick a line. Pick an emotion and work backwards.  My writing partner and I, when we were discussing this came up with this plot line as an example.

The line. “Do you have an umbrella?”

The emotion. Irony. laughter.

The plot. A man is delivering a large box truck full of umbrellas to a wholesale store in New York’s Chinatown. The truck breaks down and while he is waiting for a tow truck, the 911 attack happens. He grabs his backpack, locks the truck and heads uptown.  He goes through a series of trials and tribulations and it takes him hours to get back to his home in the Bronx. He finally gets to his house and realizes that he left his jacket with the house keys in the truck. He sits on the stoop, waiting for his wife to come home. A passerby stops in front of the house and they look at the horizon, where the smoke from the towers are heading toward them. They strike up a conversation and the stranger sits next to the man and introduces himself.  It suddenly begins to rain, and the stranger looks up and says, “What I wouldn’t give for an umbrella.” At which the man begins to giggle hysterically.

Now, I modified the line here, and I did it on purpose because the emphasis I want for all these blogs is there is not a single rule you cannot break if you have a good reason. Writing exercises are designed to inspire you, not lock you into a prison. If you come to the end of the setup and you need to change things, do it. The best short story I ever wrote was inspired by a writing exercise where the author of the exercise was completely wrong. His (incorrect) premise was that in Japanese, if you say, “I am looking at the wall,” you are literally saying “I and the wall are looking.” I have since found out that is wrong, but it doesn’t matter. I didn’t know that then, and what the author suggested was to reverse your perspective.  The Japanese implies that the wall can look back. What does that mean for the reality of your story?  For me, it started with a woman eating a bonbon, and the bonbon tasting the inside of the women’s throat. That initial scene wound up in the recycle bin, but the story it inspires remains what I think is my most successful piece.

As with everything, use what is useful, discard the rest. We all have days where we make hay while the sun shines and we all have days where we huddle in the barn and listen to the rain.

Maybe what I am saying with these exercises is, “Do you need an umbrella?”

Commit, my friends. See you next week.